Listening to the developers’ feedback, the Windows Azure Mobile Services team is releasing new features and updates to make Mobile Services a more robust and flexible backend for mobile apps that scale. Contributing its expertise in bridging Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, MS Open Tech built the new Android Notification Hubs SDK and updated the Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services.

Updates to Windows Azure Mobile Services

Adding support for Custom API allowing developers to write server-side scripts that aren’t associated with a SQL database table and giving them additional control over the HTTP request and response so that they can receive types other than JSON and then detect and append their own HTTP headers.

MS Open Tech contributed the Android push notifications support in Notification Hubs

Notification Hubs lets you broadcast push notifications to millions of devices across platforms from almost any backend hosted in Windows Azure. Notification Hubs are a great way to modernize existing apps hosted in Virtual Machines, Cloud Services or Web Sites by engaging users through push notifications; it’s also a great way to enrich the push notifications support available through Mobile Services by subscribing different subsets of users to different topics.

Notification Hub enables broadcast push notifications scenario not only for consumer apps but also for enterprise apps that need to update thousands or millions of mobile users simultaneously.

Building on our learning and experience in previous releases, MS Open Tech contributed the support for Android push notifications via Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) to the suite of supported platforms. With this release, developers can now broadcast push notifications to Windows Store, iOS and Android devices via WNS, APNS, and GCM, respectively.

As for previous releases, the Android Notification Hubs SDK is open sourced and you can find the code on GitHub.

Free 20MB SQL Database

Last but not least, and still responding to developers’ feedback, Windows Azure now offers a 20MB SQL Database to every Windows Azure subscription that can be used with Windows Azure Mobile Services or Web Sites. This will definitively help developers building mobile and web apps and need to store relational data in the cloud. And this will also be handy to have a free data option during development and test.

Next steps

You can start building Mobile Services powered that leverage Custom API and local git for source control today. You can also add Android broadcast push support to any app built on Windows Azure with Notification Hubs.